Document Actions

LISP 2 family

"The LISP 2 project was a collaboration of System Development Corporation
and Information International Inc., and was initially planned for the Q32
computer, which was built by IBM for military purposes and which had a 48
bit word and 18 bit addresses, i.e., it was better than the IBM 7090 for an
ambitious project. Unfortunately, the Q32 at SDC was never equipped with
more than 48K words of this memory. When it became clear that the Q32 had
too little memory, it was decided to develop the language for the IBM 360/67
and the Digital Equipment PDP-6 — SDC was acquiring the former, while III
and M.I.T. and Stanford preferred the latter. The project proved more
expensive than expected, the collaboration proved more difficult than
expected, and so LISP 2 was dropped. From a 1970s point of view, this was
regrettable, because much more money has since been spent to develop LISPs
with fewer features. However, it was not then known that the dominant
machine for AI research would be the PDP-10, a successor of the PDP-6. A
part of the AI community, e.g. BBN and SRI made what proved to be an
architectural digression in doing AI work on the SDS 940 computer." [McCarthy
1978]

"Storage conventions and a basic set of functions for LISP 2 are proposed. Since the memo was written, a way of supplementing the features of this system with the unique storage of list structure using a hash rule for computing the address in a separate free storage area for lists has been found."

"String manipulation can be made convenient within the *** language by implementing two function
1) match[workspace; pattern]
and
2) construct[format; pmatch].
In this memo I describe how I think these two functions can be implemented, and how they might be used to express operations now conveniently denoted in string manipulation languages such as COMIT, SNOBOL, and METEOR."

"Specifications for a LISP 2 system are proposed. The source
language is basically ALGOL 60 extended to include list processing, input/output and language extension facilities. The
system would be implemented with a source language translator
and optimizer, the output of which could be processed by
either an interpreter or a compiler. The implementation is
specified for a single address computer with particular reference
to an IBM 7090 where necessary.
Expected efficiency of the system for list processing is significantly greater than the LISP 1.5 interpreter and also somewhat better than the LISP 1.5 compiler. For execution of
numeric algorithms the system should be comparable to many
current "algebraic" compilers.
Some familiarity with LISP 1.5, ALGOL and the IBM 7090 is
assumed."

"This correction sheet is intended to keep Memo 1A current. More
corrections will be issued from time to time, and a new memo released
when they become too numerous. The corrections are numbered according
to the paragraphs of the original."

"This document establishes a document series (TM-3417)
for the LISP 2 language and processor designed for
the IBM S/360 computer. This series includes documents
describing the syntax and semantics of the LISP 2
language, system and program design specifications,
documentation standards and conventions, and user
information."

CRISP for IBM 370 at SDC

CRISP was a Lisp-like programming language and system designed by Jeffrey A. Barnett and Doug Pintar specifically for speech research in the 1973-1974 timeframe. Its name derived from the phrase “Crunching Lisp,” and it was to run on the IBM 370 using the VM operating system. The CRISP runtime system was implemented and used via a powerful assembler, although the higher-level CRISP language was not implemented. For an overview, see: Barnett 2010 and Barnett 2009.